Dance Like Her
by MissLauraKinney
Summary: She was fourteen when she told herself she didn't care and fifteen when she cried. She was sixteen when cut herself and seventeen when she died. Erica Reyes never liked applesauce, but the taste made her feel normal.


She was fourteen when she told herself she didn't care and fifteen when she cried. She was sixteen when cut herself and seventeen when she died.

My very angsty Erica Reyes story.

I love writing stories where a characters life/backstory is worse than it actually is (for some unknown, sordid reason) and this is just one of many. PM any characters you want tragic stories written for;D

PM me who I should write for next!

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Ever since she was little Erica had hated the taste of applesauce. Here, sitting in the cold waiting room of the hospital ward, she remembered why. The bitter, metallic tangs made her throat catch, reminding her of the epilepsy, of the pain. But she kept eating. She shoveled more in her mouth, like doing that would make her mom come back, her seizures stop, her dad spend the night with her once this week. She kept eating because sometimes to get better people have to do things that make them feel worse. She ate because applesauce tasted like seizures, and applesauce was normal, and if she could pretend she tasted applesauce, maybe she could be normal too.

Erica was twelve when her mom left. Twelve when her seizures started—seizures that tasted like applesauce—and twelve when her heart was broken the first of a hundred times. The first couple of months she would ask her father every day, _when's mom coming back?_ But the answer never changed. And the silence never answered. But she kept asking. She kept asking like the more she said it, the closer her mother was to walking in the front door, like the more she asked the more her father would pay attention to her. She kept asking, even when her father stopped coming home at night, stopped coming home in the morning. She kept asking because sometimes people have to keep pressing the wound to make it get better.

Erica was fourteen when her period started, fourteen when her dad started to see her differently. She had been sitting at the kitchen table on a chilly day in September, too cold to be outdoors, but not cold enough to hide out at the library, pretending the heating wasn't working, when he came home for the first time in almost a month. She didn't have to look up from her dinner to see the disappointment in his eyes that she was still here, still so painfully present. A constant reminder of all he'd lost—and all he'd never had. So she stared at her plate, the only thing left the bitter applesauce.

She was fourteen when the looks started. She would catch him watching her sometimes, his lip curled up in distaste, his brow furrowed as he tried to tell himself she didn't look like _HER_, couldn't look like _HER._ She told herself this was okay, better than the looks her friend Sara got from her step-dad, but she can't make herself believe it. These looks told her she wasn't wanted, wasn't good enough. But she kept trying. Trying to make him love her, like the more she did the more he cared. Trying to make him notice her, like the more she talked the further out of his shell he came. She kept trying to make him see she was still there, because if she didn't mean anything to him, she couldn't hope to mean anything to anyone else.

She was fifteen when she stopped caring— when she stopped pretending it was just applesauce—and when she stopped acting like she didn't notice the whispers. She was fifteen when she woke up in the park, wearing only her pajamas, wearing the bracelet that identified her as epileptic, the bracelet that identified her as someone to be hated, someone to be shunned. But she kept crying. She kept crying because no amount of memory loss could make her forget that her mother had been ashamed of her seizing in public, so she left. She couldn't forget that her father had been unprepared to take care of a sick teenage girl, so he faded away. She couldn't make herself believe that she'd grown apart from her friends, because she knew that they had been unable to care about somebody so different, so they told her they hated her. And still she kept crying. Because sometimes you don't want other people to know you're in pain, but you hate them for not caring.

It was her sixteenth birthday when the knife slipped, when pain became her refuge from the hurt. She had been cutting vegetables for a dinner her family would never eat when The Neighbors started yelling again. They lived in the house behind hers, a block over, and the past six years had been littered with the sounds of their screaming. She had been startled, and the knife had dragged across her wrist. Warmth had spread through her hand, and she'd stared at the red blooming on her fingers. Pleasure faded to pain, and a scream of her own echoed through a room nobody but her ever entered. That night she sat huddled in the corner, disgusted at herself for enjoying the dull ache, hating herself for envying the neighbors. Because as much as he yelled, Coach Lahey was still there, and her dad wasn't. So she kept cutting. She kept cutting to numb the pain, and also to tell herself it was still there. Because no matter how many layers of skin you can grow over a wound, all is takes is one hard _shove_, and the ache in your chest stops you from breathing. So, that night, and every night since, she cut herself to sleep.

He asked. That was why she did it. Not because of the things he offered, the things he said would go away, but because he _asked_. He was the first person who had ever said, what do _you _think? The first person who cared that she hurt, too. (He asked her what the seizures were like, she said applesauce, but he knew she meant blood) He was the first person to make her feel alive, but definitely not the first to make her wish she was dead. Still she kept coming back. She came back because that was who she was. And because he meant something to her, and she wasn't going to throw that away like her mother. And even though he hurt her, and kept hurting her, didn't mean she didn't care. After all, wasn't that what people did when they loved you? That was what people did when they loved her.

She was seventeen when the world turned its back on her. She had finally found a place, found a home, found a family. Or so she'd thought. Empty words were what everyone gave her, and empty words were what Derek was best at. He had promised her a family, and she got rejected. He had promised her a sanctuary, and she got hurt. But worst of all, he had promised her forever, and she got death. So she said goodbye. For the first time in her life she said goodbye first. She was tired of waiting around for everyone else to leave her, so she left first. Trying didn't matter when there was nothing to try to get. But it hadn't been enough. It hadn't been enough to steal her heart, to steal her family, to steal her soul, but her life had to be taken too. And she knew that. Knew that things didn't get better for people like her. They only got better for people who wore their pain on the outside, people whose hurt had been deemed acceptable. People like Isaac Lahey didn't know how lucky they were to get pain people cared about, because everyone felt bad for the poor, beaten boy, but no one wanted to talk to the weird girl who pissed herself.

Erica was seventeen when she closed her eyes for the last time, the bitter metallic taste of blood in her mouth, only she knew this time, the last time, that pretending it was applesauce wasn't enough to keep her from leaving, to keep her from dying. A week after her birthday and she thought there might be a chance she could finally move on. But somehow she had ended right back where she started, laying on the ground with the taste of applesauce clinging to her lips.


End file.
